


forget me not

by brucewaynery



Series: happy steve bingo fills [10]
Category: Marvel
Genre: Fluff, Happy Steve Bingo, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:35:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21599281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brucewaynery/pseuds/brucewaynery
Summary: Steve wakes up to a Tony with grey hair and a ring on his finger.Great, he thinks,another lifetime gone.(amnesia, happy steve bingo)
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: happy steve bingo fills [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1495793
Comments: 4
Kudos: 231
Collections: Happy Steve Bingo 2019





	forget me not

Tony's smile is so goddamn bright, brighter than all the stars above them and the streetlights below them, all of Steve’s fears and doubts and anxiety dissipates into the clear night sky. 

The _yes_ he whispers, floating out in a visible cloud of vapour, is the only thing Steve can hear, filling him with joy and pure, unfiltered love, Tony’s hands, calloused and strong, grip his shoulder and pull him up for a kiss that’s more smiles and teeth than lips and tongue and Steve doesn’t want it any other way. 

When they pull apart, smiling too much, too wide, to carrying on kissing, Steve slips the ring onto Tony’s awaiting hand, steady and sure.

“I love you,” he says, reverentially, as though the speech, hardly moments prior, hadn’t covered it, hadn’t truly encompassed the amount of love he could physically have for the man before him.

Tony leans up to press a soft kiss to the corner of his mouth, “I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you.”

They take their time with each other that night, because they can, because what they have isn’t going anywhere. Steve knew from the start that Tony was it for him, the ring proves the feeling is reciprocated, that’s all. But he knows it’s so, so much more than that. It represents everything he thought were impossible at some point or another; it represents something he never thought he would have - permanence, unwavering, strong and steady. As constant as the skies darkening and as sure as the sun rising. 

There’s something gone, when Steve holds Tony that night, both exhausted, but in the best way, the way that makes you wish you were gods, never tiring and inexhaustible, just to carry on that minute, that hour, that millennia longer, Steve doesn’t miss the underlying feeling that what they had was a temporary sort of permanence. 

He’s not naive, he knows that divorce is a thing, he knows that, logically, they have a fifty percent chance of hating each other down to the very atom, a chance of all the love and fondness being replaced by sour bitterness and regret, but he also knows that nothing about them has ever contributed to the statistics, there’s nothing about them that went according to the universe, let alone conventional. He knows what the odds for them were. He knows that they were low, ridiculously, laughably so, but in the face of everything, in the face of the near-impossible (like throwing a million decahedron dice, one by one, and ending up with the digits of Pi. On the first try.), in the face of it all, they made it. They made it, together, longstanding and permanent. Officially. 

Tony’s lying on his chest when they wake up, the filtered, dimmed, sunlight, streaming into the room highlights their skin. It makes Tony’s hair look like silver and gold and the ring on his finger gleam and glitter. Steve can’t help it; he gently brushes a couple locks of silvering hair off Tony’s temple to press a soft kiss there, and then one more of his forehead, then his cheek, and finally, when he wakes, on his nose, just to see him scrunch his nose up, adorably, in confusion. 

It still gives Steve an insurmountable amount of nonsensical pride whenever he manages to confuse Tony.

“Good morning, beloved,” Tony says, voice low and thick, eyes still drooped as he blindly pushes his face towards Steve for a kiss.

“Morning, fiancé,” Steve replies, smiling and leaning into the kiss, humming softly.

Tony grins when they pull away, his eyes are still bright, but in that quiet way, like sunsets and sunrises, and still absolutely, without question and so far beyond doubt Steve can no longer remember it, breathtakingly gorgeous.

“I like how that sounds,” Tony admits, pressing a series of kisses to Steve’s collarbone, feathery-light and barely there; just a tease of what’s to come.

“Me too,” Steve says, taking in his appearance as JARVIS brightens up the room by clearing up the tint on the windows. Steve smiles as he sees more grey in Tony’s hair.

Tony, being both a classified genius and having known Steve for just about a decade, knows exactly what he’s smiling at, “Stop it,” he grumbles, burying his face into whatever part of Steve is closest.

Steve laughs, “You’d look good as a silver fox, baby.”

“I already look enough like your sugar daddy,” Tony says, as if he minds. He practically purrs as Steve runs his hands through his hair. Whilst he may be ~~turning~~ grey, he’s thankful that he’s not bald. Yet. 

“You are my sugar daddy,” Steve tells him, kissing his forehead, just on his hairline, again. “Keep it, just for a while, please?”

Tony pretends to deliberate and grumble some more, before he finally lifts his head from Steve’s chest, “You know I can’t say no to you when you beg,” he concedes, kissing Steve solidly on the lips.

At this point, the only reason Tony still dyes his hair is to keep up with public appearances, around Steve he doesn’t have to mask all that, hell, if it wasn't obvious already, Steve _likes_ the grey hair. God, he’s lucky.

Steve rolls them over and it turns into a gentle push and pull for dominance, one that Steve easily succumbs to, moving so he’s gazing up at Tony, letting him work him, slowly, so damn slowly to orgasm, letting him use him for his own.

They have a good day, saccharine sweet, a day that goes on forever in the best way, but at the same time, it’s over in the blink of an eye, a day spent in their own bubble, riding the high that never seems to end.

The next day, Tony woke up with a kiss on his forehead and a promise to be back for breakfast. Steve’s an energetic guy, not the manic energy that Tony has; the one that comes and goes when it pleases, but the physical, tireless, near-boundless type.

Tony fully expected this. He can’t believe he’s going to spend the rest of his life with a morning person. Although, he supposes, it can’t be too bad when he gets woken up with kisses (and sometimes more if he can convince Steve to get his morning workout in some other form).

Tony also expected him to come back. 

Steve Rogers broke a promise.

A menial, mundane one at that, but it’s the principle of the thing. Steve doesn't believe in breaking promises, however menial or mundane. If he knew he was going to be back late, he would call, or text, or something, but when the clock turns past ten, it’s the first day in three years Tony’s woken to an empty bed, feeling entirely lost and confused.

Maybe he’s forgotten? Tony hopes, uncharacteristically naive, as he forced himself to get ready, quelling that rising feel that something is wrong, off, something greater than a missing text.

“JARVIS, when did Steve get back?” Tony asks, because it has to be a when, and not an if.

“Commander Rogers has not been in, or around the premises of the Compound since he left at six-oh-three earlier this morning," JARVIS replies, sympathetic. Because of course, Tony made a sympathetic AI. 

The uneasiness masks over whatever annoyance he had for his former self, and becomes even more potent when he crashes into Rhodey.

“Platypus! I didn--”

“Steve’s been kidnapped.”

Tony’s heart falls straight out the bottom of his stomach and just keeps falling and falling and falling.

The next few hours disappear in a chaotic blur of people telling him to go home, get rest, then him ignoring them entirely, because he’s not going to leave the life of his goddamn fiancé in the hands of SHIELD, then, once they finally realise that he’s not going home (and how can it be home anyway, if Steve’s not there?), hours in front of multiple 72” screens split god knows how many times, until they find where Steve is.

“You’re not going,” Fury says, blocking his entrance onto the helicarrier.

Tony just about resists calling for his suit to send a repulser to his face. “If I don’t go in the ‘carrier, I’ll follow it with the suit.”

“Nick,” Hill says, crossing her arms, “let him go.”

Fury grits his teeth. “We don’t have time for a psych eval,” he addresses the rest of the team on the helicarrier, “keep an eye on him.”

“What do you think we’ve been doing for the past five years?” Natasha calls from inside the carrier.

Fury moves out of the way, and gives them the go-ahead, watching them fly up, then tracking them on the screen in front of him when they slip above the clouds.

They find him in an industrial freezer, somewhere in Alaska, barely conscious, bloody, bruised and handcuffed by the wrists and ankles, muttering something over and over.

_“...G. 98765420. Rogers, Steven G. 98765420. Rogers, Steven G. 98765420. Rogers, Steven G. 98765420. Rogers, Steven G. 9876…”_

Tony rushes to his side, ready to laser off the handcuffs, but Steve flinches away and stops muttering, curling in on himself as best he can. They did this to him in mere _hours_. When he finds whoever did this, he’s going to leave them in a room with Natasha and a toothpick and not come back until the screaming stops. Tony immediately sheds the suit, “Steve, Steve, can you hear me?”

Steve still keeps as far away as he possibly can, but he seems to recognise him. “Tony?”

“Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna get you somewhere safe.”

Steve knew that he was in the future, the HYDRA folk told him that much, and he remembers waking up before, he remembers finding out that all his friends are dead, he remembers the Battle of New York, he remembers the Avengers and he remembers moving into the Avenger’s Tower, previously Stark Tower, he remembers falling hopelessly, irredeemably, _unrequitedly_ in love with Tony Stark.

But according to the bright red blinking, blurry numbers hanging above the door, he’s missed out on another couple years.

He hopes and hope and hopes that he hasn’t that all of that was just a hallucination or something, deliriously, as he feels himself being carried, being told not to go to sleep, not yet, because if he falls asleep, he might stay like that, he sees an older, grey-haired Tony, (well, two blurry versions of him), begging him to stay awake, slipping his hand into his and holding on. Steve tries to grip back, tries to curl his fingers around his, but he can feel himself lose consciousness, Tony’s already fading out, and he’s being manhandled onto something far softer than a helicarrier emergency bench.

Tony hates hospitals. To be fair, he’s never met anyone who _likes_ them. Steve hates hospitals too. Does everything in his damn power to never go to them, to the point where, sometimes, in the beginning, when he still called him ‘Rogers’, he’d walk into the kitchen to find Steve digging out bullets with tweezers and bandaging the wound by himself.

He doesn’t miss that time, not really, he doesn’t miss not knowing Steve.

He’s lying in a hospital bed now, stable, according to the doctors, and it’s just a matter of time until he wakes up ( ~~if he wakes up~~ ). Steve looks so much smaller, weaker and vulnerable, so much more than Tony’s ever seen him, so much more than he ever should.

It’s almost unnatural and unnerving to see Steve with a breathing tube and an IV drip, and he’s not a particularly god-fearing, or religious man, but he finds himself making all sorts of bets, with God, with himself, almost selfishly, just so he’d never have to see Steve like this again.

He wakes up, because of course he does, because he can’t not, because Tony thinks the world can’t live on without him, because he knows that he himself can’t live on without him, because it would be a damn unfair fate for someone like Steve to predecease him.

“Congratulations,” Steve says, a little after he’s woken up, after they’ve established that the last thing he remembers happened in 2013, after Tony’s been warned, outside the room, by Fury, to take it easy with him - in 2013, they had just started becoming closer than just teammates, nowhere near to what they are now, and even though the doctors had said that he should regain his memories in the next week (turns out, HYDRA aren’t as good at memory wiping as they one were).

“On the marriage,” he confirms, quietly, in that voice that meant he’s just barely keeping down his emotions to save face for everyone around him, even if he’s down to subatomic particles, kept together by only forces that operate by the indisputable laws of the universe.

Tony doesn’t know what to say, so he thanks him, and watches over him as he sleeps.

He’s up and about in less than a day, back in the tower, going through routines that would have felt familiar to him years ago, but Tony has to root around in his own mind to recognise the way he goes to his own room at night, because why would he go to theirs when he doesn’t even know they’re together?

It hits softer than it should, really, because Tony knows that he’s going to be back to normal after a week, or because he’s so damn foolish that he thinks something irrational as love, something so irrational, the root of negative one seems positively simple in comparison, something like that, will pertain to guarantee that he gets his memories back.

He finds Steve smoking on the balcony the day after, another thing he doesn’t do as often anymore.

“I don’t know how close we are now, but may I confess something to you?” Steve asks, and it’s taken Tony all this time to realise just how lonely Steve had been at the beginning, and just how careful he’s been, even in his manner of speech.

“Of course,” Tony replies, like he always will, unbeknownst to this Steve.

“I missed another chance,” he starts, so utterly heartbroken Tony’s helpless to anything but wrap his arms tightly around him. It takes too long for Steve to drop his cigarette and respond, but Tony doesn’t let go.

“What do you mean?” Tony asks, quiet.

“I… when I woke up, the first time, everyone I knew was dead, Peggy had moved on, and I’m not-- I don’t resent her for that, or for everyone else, but I.. I lost a life and a chance at happiness, and all this, I know that we’re not… you don’t think that way or it was probably all in my head… but seeing you married and moved on… I know that I had been-- I had missed something…” Steve trails off, letting go of Tony, but not moving out of his space.

“I… Steve, you haven’t missed out on any more years,” Tony reassures.

“I hate this,” Steve says, filled with venom and bitterness, “I hate… I hate…” all his energy falls away, lost to the wind.

“I’m sorry,” he finishes, lamely, mouth barely forming the words.

It’s not a week. Steve’s back to him the next day, kissing him awake, the way he should, the way they’ve been doing for years now.

“I missed you,” Tony admits, leaning on his chest, even though Steve was with him, Steve gets what he’s trying to say.

“I love you,” Steve says, and even though it wasn’t even a week, he’s still… he can’t tell Tony that he loves him enough, if not to show his love, than to prove it to himself: he’s allowed to love him, he didn’t lose everything, not this time.

Tony pulls a Solo, declaring that he already knew, and it makes Steve laugh, then kiss him, again and again, and again, reassuring and proving over and over until their lips are red, and they’ve whispered enough promises to fill more lives than they’ll ever lead, enough to satiate them until the sun rises again.

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for reading, appreciation can be displayed in: comments, [reblogs](https://talesofsuspenses.tumblr.com/post/189360574136/forget-me-not) or sour candy


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